Troll Blood
by by Katherine Langrish
With this third book about Peer and Hilde, the children we met first in Troll Fell, Katherine Langrish has taken a great leap forward.
It begins, perhaps a little slowly for readers of the first two books, who want to get back to familiar characters and settings, in Vinland. Here, seen through the eyes of one of the indigenous inhabitants, Kwimu, a murderous fight breaks out among Viking settlers. The victors sail away home, leaving hidden corpses, and an orphaned boy to be taken care of by the "Skraelings" - the Viking word for the Native North Americans of that region. which may now be known as Newfoundland.
Katherine Langrish has done her research and Kwimu and his people are based on the Mi'kmaq of New Brunswick, whose culture is better documented than some peoples'. We return to them in the end but not till after the powerful Gunnar Ingolfson and his golden son Harald have arrived in Trollsvik.
Peer and Hilde are older now and the love story, incipient in Troll Fell and Troll Mill, runs parallel to a cracking adventure, in which the two young people sail back to Vinland on Gunnar's ship. A woman on a ship? Yes, traditionally unlucky, even if she doesn't whistle, but there is one aboard already, Gunnar's young wife, Astrid.
Astrid is an ambivalent figure, right till the end and we learn early on that she has the "troll blood" of the title. Several of Gunnar's men and Harald, his son by his first wife, think she is a witch, who has enchanted their captain. But Astrid's version is different: Gunnar has killed her betrothed and she has been given to him against her will.
In Astrid's struggles agianst her complicated inheritance and destiny, and in the downward spiral of violence that turns Harald into a figure of nightmare, Katherine Langrish seems to have stepped beyond the original scope of her trilogy. Her writing has become stronger and she has found her true authorial voice. It will be VERY interesting to see what she does next.
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